


Recollections And Realizations

by DictionaryWrites



Series: A Comprehensive Set of Attractions [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Aromantic Sherlock Holmes, Awkwardness, Biphobia, Bisexual John Watson, Demisexual Sherlock Holmes, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Misunderstandings, Past Relationship(s), Public Sex, Welsh John Watson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-07
Updated: 2015-08-07
Packaged: 2018-04-13 12:39:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4522344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DictionaryWrites/pseuds/DictionaryWrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for a very old prompt on the kink meme. "Sherlock disguises himself for a case, and John recognises him as the guy who shagged him in a night club (his first time with a bloke) when he was in med school before buggering off, in an incident that almost ruined John's life."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Recollections And Realizations

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Kink Meme Prompt](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/135216) by Anonymous. 



> **The Welsh translations are:**  
>  _Mae hi'n dwp._ \- She's stupid.  
>  _Na! Mae'n gas 'da fi y fenwy-- ugh! Deurywiol!_ \- No! I hate the woman-- ugh! Bisexual!

John isn't gay. John, if truth be told, isn't straight either. He doesn't think he's bisexual – the word doesn't fit him properly, conjures up images of metrosexual types with tight jeans and greedy natures – but he's not _straight_. And it's all very well that it doesn't matter to most people, that it's a modern world and all that and that it doesn't matter who you're interested in, but--

Well.

John has a memory burned into his mind, when he was twelve and doing Latin homework at his kitchen table, having to go from the Latin-English dictionary to the Welsh-English dictionary because he was still getting used to using bloody English all the time at this shitty little posh English school and all these fancy words were just too _hard_ for him to already know – Harry had come furiously through the door, smacking away their mum's hand from her shoulder, and she'd hissed, “Mae hi'n _dwp_!”

“Harry-”

“ _Na!_ Mae'n gas 'da fi y fenwy-- _ugh_! _Deurywiol!_ ” John hadn't known what the word had meant, at the time – Harry was fifteen, and she was gay and out about it, but he'd never heard _that_ word until then. And she'd just been so angry about it, angry about how this girl had supposedly led her on or whatever; she'd been older than Harry, John remembers, nineteen or twenty or something, because their dad had gone off alarming.

Not at the girl being bisexual, but at her age.

The way she'd spat the word, though, _deyrywiol_ , was just the same as when she said it in English. _Bisexual_ was a horrible thing, an insulting not-gay to Harry, and it really had stuck with John.

And now, what is he? He's not gay, he's not straight, he's not _bisexual_ \--

“John,” Sherlock says, dipping his head around the door, and John looks up from his laptop, arching his eyebrows and dropping his reverie for the time being. Sherlock is just an enigma and a half – he can't help but be attracted to the other man, even though he's _not_ gay, and he's never even had a relationship with another man, never really wanted to…

But then, Sherlock's got a whole host of different labels John'd never even _heard_ before Sherlock had said them with such crisp ease, as if it was John's fault for not already knowing them. Aromantic. Demisexual. Romance-repulsed.

“Yeah, Sherlock?” John asks. Sherlock's wearing a shirt that plunges mid-way down to his chest, a soft, unpleasant yellow that complements his skin even though the hue itself is horrible.

“Can you put ice cream on the shopping list? Neapolitan.”

“You don't like ice cream,” John points out, frowning at the other man despite himself.

“Yeah, I know,” Sherlock says, and then he disappears into his own room again. John considers trying to follow him and find out the specifics of what he's going to do with the ice cream, but it's a generally less dangerous ingredient he's requested, so he notes it down all the same. John will get the Tesco's own brand, just to spite him.

Shaking his head, John shuts his laptop closed and stands, shrugging on his jacket – he needs new jeans, and he's just going to try and ignore pensive thoughts about Sherlock's long, pale neck and graceful walk and pretty fingers-- _No_. He's just going to go out, buy some bloody jeans, and then get the shopping on the way back.

John walks with ease enough – he notices one girl watching him as he moves towards Marks and Sparks, one of Mycroft's people. He's heard Sherlock talk about her, and it would seem she's one of Mycroft's goons that Sherlock disapproves of least, but even still, it's a bit disconcerted to be followed while you're buying pants from M&S.

He tries to ignore it, and a few hours later he's beginning to make his way home – he'd really got side-lined by coffee, and then he'd walked past this little vintage place he'd not been in before, but the **jumpers** in there were thick and old-fashioned, not to mention _cheap_.

And then he knocks into some tall blond thing, and all but knocks the man to the floor. “Shit, _sorry_ -” John says, grasping at the guy's skinny hand and pulling him up: and then John stops short, staring.

He's had sex with men before, of course – two or three other lads while they were on tour, and he'd had sex with men at St Bart's, but the first time he'd had sex with a man had been in his final year of medical school at King's College, and the boy had been younger than John had, two years younger, maybe.

John had been in a relationship with a woman called Henrietta at the time, a German girl studying Classics, but the younger man – boy, really, he was a boy – had caught John staring at the curve of his arse in those drainpipe jeans he'd been wearing, and he'd shoved John against the wall with a little hiss on his tongue.

John had turned them around, of course, taken control and held his throat 'til he'd choked – it had sent such a rush of power through him, throwing around another man the way he could _never_ throw around a woman, and it had been completely erotic, _mindblowingly_ so.

He'd gotten over the fact that it was a bloke as soon as the both of them were in the gent's toilets, and he had the guy – _Scott_ , John's mind supplies – back against the wall, John's cock in his arse and the guy letting out such desperate little noises John had felt like he was _dying_ , and John had been able to lift him easily, making the guy moan into John's mouth until he'd come.

He'd stained John's red shirt with white.

John had tried to get his phone number, after, on top of the world in a way he'd never bloody felt before, but the man had just stalked off with a mumble about “thanks for the distraction”, and John had felt _devastated_.

It shouldn't have affected him so much, a quick shag in the gents, but it did, and he'd ended up breaking up with Henri – Christ, he'd fucked up the next three assignments he'd had, so bloody distracted was he _all_ the time. He got over it, after a while, but God, that Scott boy had bowled him over.

And John's holding Scott's slender hand right now.

“You,” John says, staring up at him: he's got the same stupid hair a decade later, pulled forwards and curled over his forehead, blond-dyed and wonderful to grab onto, pretty lips, a tan on his skin, and big, wonderfully brown eyes. Scott glances at John's face, and then at their hands.

“Uh,” he says, in a voice far deeper than John ever remembered, but then, he'd been pretty focused on wailing into the wall rather than saying _words_ , “You can let me go.” John pulls back his hand, and he opens his mouth to say something, say whatever he _can_ , but then Scott says, “Honestly, John, I didn't think you'd recognize me.”

“You remember me?” John asks the question breathlessly.

“Remember you?” Scott's head tilts, the brow furrowing, his lips parting slightly in thought, and suddenly despite the disguise John sees him: the blood drains quickly out of his face, and suddenly John is falling back on his arse on the ground, staring up at Sherlock _fucking_ Holmes with one of his _bloody_ disguises on. “John? John, are you alright?”

Suddenly his cheeks feel flushed hot with embarrassment or something, or _something_ , and then his vision begins to blur – John has only a vague thought of _vagus nerve_ before his head drops back and he's unconscious on the floor.

He wakes up confused and dazed on a leather chaise long, and he groans quietly, sitting up and clutching at his head. Mycroft is sitting in a matching chair, his umbrella held beside his knee, parallel to the ramrod straight line of the older man's calf, and John stares at him blearily.

“Where-”

“I sent my brother home. He's under the impression that you haven't eaten, and fainted as a result. As opposed to a _shock_ reaction triggering your vagus nerve.” Mycroft speaks very, very deliberately, his tone low and serious, his expression calculatedly neutral. Somehow, he knows exactly what John fainted at, and--

Why _had_ he fainted? He's never fainted before.

“How'd you know?”

“I've had my brother attended to since he was fifteen.” John stares at Mycroft with a dull expression in his eyes, and Mycroft continues, “When he was completing his chemistry degree, he often travelled further afield from Cambridge, in order that any experimental trysts need not be heard of by his classmates.”

“Experimental trysts,” John repeats, trying not to let his fury bleed into the words. “You _knew_.”

“Of course I did,” Mycroft says, furrowing his brows for a moment, and then he adds, “Sherlock doesn't.”

“What do you mean he doesn't? _I_ wasn't wearing hair dye and bloody colour contacts! He looked right into my _face_!”

“And do you think Sherlock remembers the other five people he had sex with in his time at university, categorizing them by differing weights, ages, genders and races as part of an _experiment_ as to whom he was attracted to?” John stares at Mycroft, and Mycroft looks all but _solemn_. John feels sick.

“He messed up my life,” John whispers. “I'd never- I'm not gay.” This is said _sternly_ , and Mycroft feigns innocence, giving a shrug of his broad, brown-clad shoulders. “I'd never shagged a bloke before.”

Mycroft gives a delicate inclination of his head, and then says, “Are you going to tell him?”

“Tell him what? Oh, sorry you're apparently not interested in any single person except Irene, Sherlock, but you did let me come in your arse once when we were in our twenties-”

“ _John!”_ Mycroft snaps at him, tone full of venom, and John realizes when he looks at the other man that there's an embarrassed tinge of pink on his cheeks and his ears. Right. Maybe a bit explicit for talking to Sherlock's brother, even if Mycroft does usually seem unruffled by basically everything.

“No,” John says finally. “I'm not going to tell him.” He feels betrayed, laid open, but if Mycroft says Sherlock doesn't remember then John knows he's right – why would John have been important, back then? He wasn't.

“What _are_ you going to do? Sex can be a _blind_ spot for him, you know, but he may still figure it out himself.”

“Delete it.” Mycroft gives a blithe smile at John's attempt at humour, but then he nods his head.

John doesn't sleep that night. Nor the next. Nor the next.

\---

“John?” Sherlock asks, and John's head _whips_ around to look at him, his eyes red-rimmed – Mycroft must have said _something_ to him last night, something unpleasant or shocking or perhaps threatening. John hasn't slept in the past few days, but he's finally beginning to calm down again.

“Yeah?”

“Did you get the ice cream?” John suddenly relaxes, letting out a little laugh, and then he shakes his head.

“No. Sorry, I'll, uh, I'll pick it up tonight.”

“What did you think I was going to ask you?” John stares at him blankly, as if he's desperately trying to sort

And so he says, “Er- just- it's not important.” Sherlock frowns, furrowing his brow, and he thinks back to when John had come back from Mycroft's office a few days ago after his little hunger-affected fainting spell, his clothes ruffled, his face wet with swe-

Sherlock feels the blood drain out of his face as he stares at John: it clicks.

“Oh my _God_.” Sherlock whispers, and John looks terrified.

“Look, Sherlock, I didn't want to tell you because I knew-”

“You and _Mycroft_ ,” Sherlock says, tone thick with horror. He doesn't even notice John's expression as he turns around, clutching at his head. The experiment in front of him is well forgotten – he's too focused on the completely _awful_ idea of his brother, his _brother_ , and his **best friend** \- “ _Ugh_.”

“No, no, Sherlock-”

“Oh, don't _deny_ it!” Sherlock snaps, and he waves John away, stalking out of the room as he shakes his head to try and rid it of the horrible, horrible idea.

\---

John stares after him, struck dumb. The idea has never even occurred to him – he's not _gay_ , after all, and he's not _bisexual_ , so most of the time he tries to ignore men completely. But, then--

Mycroft.

Mycroft Holmes.

John lets out an awkward little laugh, just to himself in the kitchen, and moves to make himself a cup of tea. _Nope_. Stupid idea, even if it was Sherlock's. One he just should not entertain.

 


End file.
